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Monday, May 3, 2010

CRASH: Never Waste An Environmental "Crisis"

One thing you can count on from the collective; when there's bad news...or even bad hyperbole...they will shortly be calling for bad law in response. As darkness follows putting out a candle.

There is an oil well out of control in the Gulf. That's happened before. It will happen again. We will learn how better to prevent it. An industry that provides us essential fuel, employs millions of Americans, and does it with considerable responsibility will continue to improve.

Well, it will if the collective can be stopped. See, the radical, nut-bag green faction of the collective takes this accident in the Gulf as their moment of opportunity--

The oil disaster [see "hyperbole" above] plaguing the Gulf of Mexico and our coastal states puts our desperate need for a new clean energy economy in stark relief. We need to move away from dirty, dangerous and deadly energy sources.

...there should be no doubt left that drilling will only harm our coasts and the people who live there.

Taking a temporary break from offshore drilling is an important step, but it's not enough. We need to stop new offshore drilling for good, now. And then we need an aggressive plan to wean America from dirty fossil fuels in the next two decades.

So, we have the view from the "fire bad" boob Michael Brune who now heads the Sierra Club, who also believes (contrary to all science and engineering) that we can replace fossil fuels somehow in twenty years. Here's Mikey with some buds at a "green fashion show". Wonder how many of them biked there...?

But, just for some perspective, ask yourself this: how many oiled birds will die in the Gulf, versus how many birds will be killed by wind turbines around the country this year? Or cats?

Despite this awful leak, offshore drilling is statistically extremely safe. The Energy Information Administration maintains that offshore drilling has a stellar safety record, spilling only a fraction of one percent of all extracted oil since 1975.

A joint study by NASA and the Smithsonian Institution several years ago found that offshore drilling is a smaller source of oceanic oil contamination than tanker accidents or nature herself.

President Obama should have opened more areas to drilling than he did. Because he bowed to environmentalists in severely limiting where he would allow new drilling, he might again in the face of renewed demands that the oil stay underground forever. He shouldn't.

The neo-luddite Brune also cried crocodile tears about the poor, exploited rig hands who work on those dangerous things, doing that dangerous...stuff... Of course, those hands get paid quite well for what they do, and kind of would like to keep doing it, thank you very much. They would like to keep doing it for American companies, especially.

Because, reality is, somebody will be producing the oil America will continue to demand--Mr. Brune be damned--and it SHOULD be the United States leading the way. But it won't matter to the Russians, Red Chinese, Cubans, Angolans, or any other nation who can cobble together the technology to punch holes in the ground. They WILL be out there, drilling using whatever passes for environmental responsibility with them.